Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (Courbevoie, 1894 - Paris, 1961), was a French novelist, physician and polemicist. He wrote in French in a style close to spoken language and street slang, which reshaped the prose of twentieth-century fiction. His reputation remains contested because of his antisemitic writings and his activities under the German occupation during the Second World War.

The only child of a modest family, he left school early and worked as an apprentice and errand boy. He enlisted at eighteen, fought in the First World War and was wounded near Ypres, an injury that left him with lasting physical problems. He later spent time in London and a year in Africa, where he saw the French colonial system at first hand. Back in Paris he studied medicine, worked for the League of Nations in Geneva and then practised in working-class districts outside the capital. His first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, appeared in 1932 and drew a strong response, with admirers and critics across the political spectrum. Death on the Installment Plan (1936) returned to his childhood and youth. From 1937 he published antisemitic pamphlets that cost him much of his readership. During the occupation he collaborated with the Germans, fled to Germany and then to Denmark, where he was detained. He returned to France in 1951 after a conviction and a pardon, and resumed his work as a doctor and writer at Meudon.

His prose, with its breathless rhythm, oral syntax and colloquial register, broke with academic conventions and left a mark on writers such as Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski. Many critics regard him as one of the great French novelists of the twentieth century, although his legacy still divides readers on moral grounds. Reading him therefore means weighing his formal inventiveness against the opinions he expressed outside his books.